This paper calculates the impact of Active Labour Market Programmes through the use of three new indicators measuring the application performance of the unemployed. These indicators can be measured repeatedly and therefore allow the usage of Panel Regression methods, cancelling out any...

Parental leave regulations in most OECD countries have two key policy instruments: job protection and cash benefits. This paper studies how mothers’ return to work behavior and labor market outcomes are affected by alternative mixes of these key policy parameters. Exploiting a series of major...

Can different social groups develop different demands for social insurance of risks to health and work? We study this issue across language groups in Switzerland. Language defines social groups and Swiss language groups are separated by a clear geographic border. Actual levels of social...

Public agencies rely on two key modes to procure goods and services: auctions and direct negotiations. The relative advantages of these two modes are still imperfectly understood. This paper therefore studies public procurement of regional passenger railway services in Germany, where regional...

The Austrian Social Security Database (ASSD) is a matched firm-worker data set, which records the labor market history of almost 11 million individuals from January 1972 to April 2007. Moreover, more than 2.2 million firms can be identified. The individual labor market histories are described in...

We study the short-run effect of involuntary job loss on comprehensive measures of public health costs. We focus on job loss induced by plant closure, thereby addressing the reverse causality problem of deteriorating health leading to job loss as job displacements due to plant closure are...

In this paper, we suggest a novel approach to program evaluation that allows identification of the causal effect of a training program on the likelihood of being invited to a job interview under weak assumptions. The idea is to measure the program-effects by pre- and post-treatment data that are...

In 1997, the Swiss government introduced active labor market programs on a large scale to improve the job chances of unemployed workers. This paper evaluates the effect of these programs on the duration of unemployment. Our evaluation methodology allows for selectivity affecting the inflow into...

We conducted an experiment to describe how social learners use information about the relation between payoffs and behavior. Players chose between two technologies repeatedly. Payoffs were random, but one technology was better because its expected payoff was higher. Players were divided into two...

The aim of this paper is to study whether schooling choices are affected by social interactions. Such social interactions may be important because children enjoy spending time with other children or parents learn from other parents about the ability of their children. Identification is based on...